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SXSW 2018: Get up to speed on Advanced TV with Lionsgate

Last month, thousands flocked to Austin, Texas for one of the biggest conference and festival events of the year: South by Southwest (SXSW). More than just your typical conference, SXSW celebrates the convergence of the interactive, film, and music industries; proving that when diverse topics and people come together, innovation happens.

For us, this year’s SXSW was particularly exciting. At the Brand Innovators Austin Summit, one of our valued clients, Amanda Kozlowski, SVP Digital Marketing for Lionsgate, joined Ed Montes, our President of Solutions & Chief Revenue Officer, to discuss the latest in Advanced TV in a very well-attended fireside chat.

Kozlowski discussed how Lionsgate has used Advanced TV to revolutionize their customer experience. The conversation covered everything from the basics of the high-impact format to how Lionsgate uses Advanced TV to tell a cohesive story and measure the effectiveness of this format.

Interested in upping your own Advanced TV game? Here are a few of the key takeaways from Kozlowski that can help get you there.

1. Treat Advanced TV as a supplement to your mix, not a replacement

When thinking about adding Advanced TV to your media mix, consider it to be a supplement to traditional linear buys, not a replacement.

For Kozlowski and her team at Lionsgate, Advanced TV is not a standalone channel; it is incorporated holistically into their overall omnichannel strategy. In fact, Lionsgate has been building campaigns from the ground up. Instead of looking at projects from the lens of revenue forecasts through to marketing expenditure, they start on the opposite end of the spectrum. Kozlowski’s team asks: What is the size of the market that we are trying to penetrate? What frequency is needed to get consumers to act? Only after starting with those answers will Kozlowski’s team look at the optimum mix of channels for ad targeting and frequency.

2. Take advantage of Advance TV’s audience targeting capabilities

Advanced TV buying, whether it is Addressable TV served through Lionsgate’s MVPD partners or Connected TV with partners like dataxu, has enabled Kozlowski and her team to target specific audiences and reach them where and when it will deliver the greatest impact. Lionsgate’s TV buying is no longer based solely on age and gender, but takes into account psychographic and behavioral lenses as well. Lionsgate refers to this as an audience-based buying approach. With Advanced TV, Lionsgate can adjust positioning and creative in order to make the biggest impact with a particular target audience.

3. Get over the sticker shock of Advanced TV CPMs already

Advanced TV typically has a higher CPM than traditional linear television buys. For some marketing professionals, this can be a bit off-putting when trying out a new media format. However, for the team at Lionsgate, there are three primary reasons why they aren’t phased by the cost:

The level of insights gleaned from Advanced TV and how it is performing adds additional value that goes above and beyond what is possible from traditional TV.

Advanced TV offers the ability to optimize creatives in a way that is not possible with linear broadcast.

Adding Advanced TV to their marketing mix has enabled the home entertainment team at Lionsgate to map to conversion. And with this in place, Kozlowski and her team have seen that there is not a marked difference in actual cost between traditional linear and Advanced TV when it comes to return on ad spend (ROAS).

If you’re interested in incorporating OTT, Addressable or Linear Programmatic television in your current media plan, feel free to reach out. It will definitely expand your targeting capabilities to beyond just age and gender. By understanding your consumer on a psychographic and behavioral level, your organization will be able to implement audience-based decisioning and drive change, just like Lionsgate has. As Kozlowski said onstage at SXSW, “Don’t be afraid of the consumer.” Use Advanced TV as an opportunity to learn from them and use any activity as an opportunity to test, optimize, and improve. Thanks again, Lionsgate, for sharing your awesome experience with us!